The Rebecca movement—Welsh riots that heralded new wave of class anger
A storm raged in the countryside between 1839 and 1843. Poor farmers and workers united in uproar at the latest attempt to impose a capitalist order. Charlie Kimber explores a new book on the Rebecca Riots
Rebbeca’s Country by Rhian E Jones
SOCIALIST WORKER Issue 2936
Rhian E Jones has written a story of riot and resistance that is a model of how to bring history alive and make it sing for today.
The Rebecca movement in 1830s and 40s Wales was part of a revolt from below against the enforcement of capitalist priorities and new state powers. It was inspiringly radical.
The target of their anger was tollgates set up by turnpike trusts dominated by the rich which prevented free access to the roads.
The Rebecca movement’s leaders summoned large groups of men to an assembly point with horns, rockets and flares.
Protesters painted their faces white, red and black. They wore high-crowned black hats, white lace caps, straw bonnets, white shirts, petticoats, shawls or animal hides.
The movement took its name from the owner of the dress worn by one of its first prominent figures. Or maybe it came from a passage in the bible where Rebecca talks of the need to “possess the gates of those who hate them”.
Such protest actions drew on traditions of folk rituals, carnival and popular reprisals.
Here people would dress up, bang drums and make other “rough music” outside the homes of overcharging shopkeepers or men who beat their wives.
But this was no mere performance. The Rebecca protesters were armed with guns or scythes, axes, pitchforks and reaping hooks. And they didn’t just demonstrate.
They smashed and set fire to the tollgates, sent bloodcurdling warnings to the owners and defied the authorities.
As one Rebeccaite statement said, “As for the constable and the policemen, Becca and her children heeds no more of them than the grasshoppers which fly in the summer.” Today they would be called terrorists.
Rural Wales was no paradise before the industrial revolution. But people reacted furiously against a new order that privatised and enclosed common land, tore away their meagre methods of mutual support and imposed extra rules and laws.
And they were incensed that this was done through a remote and wholly unaccountable authority speaking a language—English, not Welsh—they didn’t share.
Jones gives pulsating accounts of the resistance and doesn’t exclude, as many other accounts do, the role of women.
The Carmarthen protest in June 1843 included women marchers, and around two-thirds of street spectators were women and girls.
During the storming of Carmarthen workhouse, Frances Evans, a young servant, was observed urging the invading crowd onto the building’s upper floor.
Scandalously, she was also seen dancing on the dining hall table, for which she later found herself on trial.
Women turned out to witness and encourage the destruction of toll gates, and courtrooms were regularly packed with the mothers, wives, sisters, daughters and partners of arrested Rebeccaites.
Wales was at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution, the rise of the capitalist class and Britain’s imperial project.
“From Merthyr at the northern tip, the advance of industrialisation swept through the valleys of Glamorganshire, spreading east into Monmouthshire and west to Swansea, Neath and Port Talbot,” writes Jones.
Merthyr, with a population of 8,000 in 1801, was by the 1830s a town of 50,000.
Regrettably for the capitalists, the explosive development of industry spawned a militant working class. It was drawn from the rural areas and included migrants from all over the world, particularly Ireland and Spain.
These workers organised and fought back over wages, and jobs—and for democracy. Riots, strikes and bigger challenges—such as the Merthyr Rising of 1831—convulsed towns and parts of the countryside.
Chartism, the world’s first great workers’ movement, had deep roots in Wales. In 1839 workers and the poor took over the town of Llanidloes for five days. Then came the much bigger Newport Uprising—an insurrectionary attempt. Welsh workers also joined the cross-Britain general strike of 1842.
The threat that rural-based movements such as Rebecca could fuse with the workers in the industrial areas terrified a ruling class that was all too aware of the revolutionary events in France. They replied with brutal repression.
Warned in advance, soldiers and police shot and arrested Rebeccaites who attacked tollgates in Pontarddulais and nearby Hendy in 1843. But their hopes this would crack the movement failed as huge crowds supported the arrested activists at their trial.
Miners threatened to use their industrial knowledge of explosives to blow up the roads—and to ambush the police.
By the autumn of 1843, Rebecca activists controlled some 2,000 square miles of territory across Pembrokeshire, Cardiganshire and Carmarthenshire.
In Swansea the combined revolt saw copper miners strike for five weeks against wage cuts and around the same time Rebecca activists burned the Ty Coch gate in St Thomas.
People flowed between strikes and riots with, for example, workers sacked during trade slumps joining the rural revolts.
The movement faded because of intense repression, with military rule in some places and 2,000 troops and police flooding south west Wales.
There were other factors. Railway building made it easier for people to move around and crucially most of the tollgates went.
But the central question was the actions of the Rebeccaites themselves. Just as in the wider Chartist movement, Wales saw a foretaste of the splits between liberals and workers that would burst into continent-wide focus during the revolutions of 1848.
Rebecca saw class differences and arguments about strategy. Some of its activists, mostly the better-off and those with land and property, wanted just to win over tolls and then settle into more mundane campaigns for reform.
Others demanded the movement move on to other issues such as tithes—money to the Church of England—and the poor law that penned up the unemployed in workhouses.
More fundamentally, some craved to find their niche in capitalism, others to tear up the structures that oppressed and exploited them, and to win by using all their strength whether it was legal or not.
As a poem in the great Chartist newspaper The Northern Star proclaimed:
Rebecca, that brave Amazon!
Comes rolling o’er your brows,
And like a mighty avalanche,
Destruction loud she vows
To your bastilles and your police, As fiercer on she rolls,
She wars against the system, now
She’s conquer’d all the tolls.
At a great meeting in August 1843 on the slopes of Mynydd Sylen, near Llanelli, up to 3,000 Rebeccaites met to discuss the way forward.
The crowd included small farmers, landless agricultural labourers, miners who had given up a day’s pay to attend. But also there was the Llanelli landowner and magistrate William Chambers.
The dominant group argued for an end to the night-time meetings that organised violence and a turn to respectable agitation.
The meeting agreed to a lengthy petition to queen Victoria and less radical measures. But other voices opposed the turn to “moderation”. At a meeting a few days later, one speaker said, “The great men are wanting us to hold no more midnight meetings. We will meet by day and by night also.
“They are fearing for their rents when they want us to give up our meetings at night. They feel our force and they fear us.” But the working class was too small, too inexperienced and without independent organisation. “Calmer” elements won out.
Jones says that the Rebecca movement has echoes for today. She writes, “Rather than a single-minded campaign against tollgates, this looked more like an 1840s version of the Occupy campaigns that arose after the 2008 financial crisis or, a decade later, the Gilets Jaunes of France.”
The Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote in the 1920s, “The Chartist movement resembles a prelude which contains in an undeveloped form the musical theme of the whole opera.
In this sense the British working class can and must see in Chartism not only its past but also its future.” The defiance and class fury of the Rebecca movement is also part of that, and Jones has brought it to life.
Rhian E Jones has written a story of riot and resistance that is a model of how to bring history alive and make it sing for today.
The Rebecca movement in 1830s and 40s Wales was part of a revolt from below against the enforcement of capitalist priorities and new state powers. It was inspiringly radical.
The target of their anger was tollgates set up by turnpike trusts dominated by the rich which prevented free access to the roads.
The Rebecca movement’s leaders summoned large groups of men to an assembly point with horns, rockets and flares.
Protesters painted their faces white, red and black. They wore high-crowned black hats, white lace caps, straw bonnets, white shirts, petticoats, shawls or animal hides.
The movement took its name from the owner of the dress worn by one of its first prominent figures. Or maybe it came from a passage in the bible where Rebecca talks of the need to “possess the gates of those who hate them”.
Such protest actions drew on traditions of folk rituals, carnival and popular reprisals.
Here people would dress up, bang drums and make other “rough music” outside the homes of overcharging shopkeepers or men who beat their wives.
But this was no mere performance. The Rebecca protesters were armed with guns or scythes, axes, pitchforks and reaping hooks. And they didn’t just demonstrate.
They smashed and set fire to the tollgates, sent bloodcurdling warnings to the owners and defied the authorities.
As one Rebeccaite statement said, “As for the constable and the policemen, Becca and her children heeds no more of them than the grasshoppers which fly in the summer.” Today they would be called terrorists.
Rural Wales was no paradise before the industrial revolution. But people reacted furiously against a new order that privatised and enclosed common land, tore away their meagre methods of mutual support and imposed extra rules and laws.
And they were incensed that this was done through a remote and wholly unaccountable authority speaking a language—English, not Welsh—they didn’t share.
Jones gives pulsating accounts of the resistance and doesn’t exclude, as many other accounts do, the role of women.
The Carmarthen protest in June 1843 included women marchers, and around two-thirds of street spectators were women and girls.
During the storming of Carmarthen workhouse, Frances Evans, a young servant, was observed urging the invading crowd onto the building’s upper floor.
Scandalously, she was also seen dancing on the dining hall table, for which she later found herself on trial.
Women turned out to witness and encourage the destruction of toll gates, and courtrooms were regularly packed with the mothers, wives, sisters, daughters and partners of arrested Rebeccaites.
Wales was at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution, the rise of the capitalist class and Britain’s imperial project.
“From Merthyr at the northern tip, the advance of industrialisation swept through the valleys of Glamorganshire, spreading east into Monmouthshire and west to Swansea, Neath and Port Talbot,” writes Jones.
Merthyr, with a population of 8,000 in 1801, was by the 1830s a town of 50,000.
Regrettably for the capitalists, the explosive development of industry spawned a militant working class. It was drawn from the rural areas and included migrants from all over the world, particularly Ireland and Spain.
These workers organised and fought back over wages, and jobs—and for democracy. Riots, strikes and bigger challenges—such as the Merthyr Rising of 1831—convulsed towns and parts of the countryside.
Chartism, the world’s first great workers’ movement, had deep roots in Wales. In 1839 workers and the poor took over the town of Llanidloes for five days. Then came the much bigger Newport Uprising—an insurrectionary attempt. Welsh workers also joined the cross-Britain general strike of 1842.
The threat that rural-based movements such as Rebecca could fuse with the workers in the industrial areas terrified a ruling class that was all too aware of the revolutionary events in France. They replied with brutal repression.
Warned in advance, soldiers and police shot and arrested Rebeccaites who attacked tollgates in Pontarddulais and nearby Hendy in 1843. But their hopes this would crack the movement failed as huge crowds supported the arrested activists at their trial.
Miners threatened to use their industrial knowledge of explosives to blow up the roads—and to ambush the police.
By the autumn of 1843, Rebecca activists controlled some 2,000 square miles of territory across Pembrokeshire, Cardiganshire and Carmarthenshire.
In Swansea the combined revolt saw copper miners strike for five weeks against wage cuts and around the same time Rebecca activists burned the Ty Coch gate in St Thomas.
People flowed between strikes and riots with, for example, workers sacked during trade slumps joining the rural revolts.
The movement faded because of intense repression, with military rule in some places and 2,000 troops and police flooding south west Wales.
There were other factors. Railway building made it easier for people to move around and crucially most of the tollgates went.
But the central question was the actions of the Rebeccaites themselves. Just as in the wider Chartist movement, Wales saw a foretaste of the splits between liberals and workers that would burst into continent-wide focus during the revolutions of 1848.
Rebecca saw class differences and arguments about strategy. Some of its activists, mostly the better-off and those with land and property, wanted just to win over tolls and then settle into more mundane campaigns for reform.
Others demanded the movement move on to other issues such as tithes—money to the Church of England—and the poor law that penned up the unemployed in workhouses.
More fundamentally, some craved to find their niche in capitalism, others to tear up the structures that oppressed and exploited them, and to win by using all their strength whether it was legal or not.
As a poem in the great Chartist newspaper The Northern Star proclaimed:
Rebecca, that brave Amazon!
Comes rolling o’er your brows,
And like a mighty avalanche,
Destruction loud she vows
To your bastilles and your police, As fiercer on she rolls,
She wars against the system, now
She’s conquer’d all the tolls.
At a great meeting in August 1843 on the slopes of Mynydd Sylen, near Llanelli, up to 3,000 Rebeccaites met to discuss the way forward.
The crowd included small farmers, landless agricultural labourers, miners who had given up a day’s pay to attend. But also there was the Llanelli landowner and magistrate William Chambers.
The dominant group argued for an end to the night-time meetings that organised violence and a turn to respectable agitation.
The meeting agreed to a lengthy petition to queen Victoria and less radical measures. But other voices opposed the turn to “moderation”. At a meeting a few days later, one speaker said, “The great men are wanting us to hold no more midnight meetings. We will meet by day and by night also.
“They are fearing for their rents when they want us to give up our meetings at night. They feel our force and they fear us.” But the working class was too small, too inexperienced and without independent organisation. “Calmer” elements won out.
Jones says that the Rebecca movement has echoes for today. She writes, “Rather than a single-minded campaign against tollgates, this looked more like an 1840s version of the Occupy campaigns that arose after the 2008 financial crisis or, a decade later, the Gilets Jaunes of France.”
The Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote in the 1920s, “The Chartist movement resembles a prelude which contains in an undeveloped form the musical theme of the whole opera.
In this sense the British working class can and must see in Chartism not only its past but also its future.” The defiance and class fury of the Rebecca movement is also part of that, and Jones has brought it to life.
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